1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to field service, and in particular, the present invention is related to providing wireless communications for data flow to and from field service professionals.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the field service industry, a technician may spend a significant portion of his time involved in administrative or clerical tasks. Some of these activities take place away from the job site, such as receiving jobs from a dispatcher, calling in to a central office to verify the status and location of a job, and preparing and sending in time records. Other of these administrative activities may take place while at the job site, such as checking the availability or cost of parts or verifying prior history of the equipment at a job site.
Necessary as they are, these activities reduce the efficiency of the technician in his primary purpose: to field service the equipment at the job site. Many of these tasks are made slightly more efficient through the use of cellular phones, wireless pagers, or other wireless communications services. However, traditionally, it is still necessary for a technician to actively initiate much of the communication required for these tasks, and in many cases to contact a human operator of one sort or another at his office. This results in further lost time as the technician goes through this process, as well as incurring additional cost to the office operator to provide staff sufficient to respond effectively to the information which may be needed by various technicians in the field.
A further difficulty with wireless communication systems that may be used by field service technicians is that they often require continuous contact between the office and technician in order to provide effective benefits to the technician. The connections between such wireless systems are often intermittent, complicating the communications and reducing the efficiency of the technician.
Using conventional field service wireless communication systems, if a technician using a wireless, mobile software solution is out of coverage, the software will not operate unless connected through the network. Once back in coverage, the technician must take overt action to transmit data, such as spending time downloading needed information in a batch rather than simply downloading new information. In another situation, if it is possible to queue information, the application stops processing while it waits for the technician to return to coverage. This means that while other technicians working in the field are in coverage they arc not able to communicate with the home office as the application is waiting for a response from the technician who is out of coverage.
Currently, technicians are working with handheld PC's on rooftops, in elevator shafts, and other rugged environments and few technicians are proficient in their typing skills, making it difficult to use an application whose primary input method is the keyboard.
As a result, there is a need for continued improvement to wireless field service systems for mobile field service personnel to use when receiving, performing, and tracking service work from the office.